To prepare for the coming testnet period with incentive rewards ADA North Pool has invested in hardware that should scale well for the next coming years. Here are some of the highlights (most brands are left out for security reasons):
For redundancy we have gone with two 1200 watt UPS from PowerWalker that will be our backup source both for the routers to keep internet up and running but also for the computers to keep them running during a power outage.
Two 4 Terrabyte enterprise disks in raid 1 that are tested and meant to run 24/7 and with a high reliability and long age before mean time of failure. Draws roughly 10 Watt in operational mode and some 5 watts in idle mode. The reason for such large capacity was a study I did where I saw on main net the largest epoch could consume up to 1.7 Gigabytes of disk space. So to scale well for the future we have room for 4000 gigabyte 🙂
Two NVME 500 Gigabyte disks for the server operation system. Draws around 2 watts in operational mode and less than a single watt in idle mode.
64 Gigabyte of 2666 MHZ error correcting ram. This will make sure the server is stable in a 24/7 environment where you could risk with regular ram having at least an 8% chance of a failure on regular types of RAM per year according to some studies, but these RAM are error correcting so will avoid this risk.
Ryzen 3700X for 8 cores (16 threads) at only 65 watts. There are some tweaks out there and I will be looking into lowering the wattage to around 45 watts hopefully as I want the staking pool to be as energy efficient as possible.
Finally while I will not detail the motherboard and what type of lan chip it uses, what I can say it is is a very highly regarded and has received many awards regarding stability and energy efficiency and LAN performance. The same goes for a new router that is ordered that has a very high input/output and high hardware specs and enterprise level security solutions.